Matador Antonio Ordóñez and Orson Welles in Ronda.
Orson Welles and Ernest Hemingway will be honored in their beloved Ronda, Spain, with statues in its bullring.
Spain’s Olive Press reported the 8-foot tall statues will feature plaques with information about the two artists. The project, funded by Unicaja bank, is estimated to cost €18,000, or nearly $20,000.
Hemingway and Welles were both bullfighting aficionados with close ties to Ronda.
A street in Ronda is named the “Paseo de Orson Welles.” His ashes are buried at the Ronda country property of his close friend, the late matador Antonio Ordoñez.
Hemingway is remembered for such novels as For Whom the Bell Tolls, which features a climactic scene inspired by real-life events that took place in Ronda during the Spanish Civil War. Hemingway also wrote the classic 1932 book on bullfighting, Death in the Afternoon, and his posthumously published The Dangerous Summer (1985), deals with the 1959 bullfight rivalry between Ordoñez and his brother-in-law Luis Miguel Dominguin.
Welles may have been inspired by those bullfights and Hemingway’s 1960 articles in Life magazine when he came to write The Sacred Beasts, which morphed into The Other Side of the Wind.
Welles dropped the bullfight aspect of The Other Side of the Wind on the first day of shooting, August 23, 1970, telling Joseph McBride he could not get cameras across the border to Tijuana, where the characters were going to watch a bullfight.
The aborted It’s All True featured a segment on bullfighting, My Friend Bonito.
An increasingly popular tourist destination, the picturesque Ronda is situated in a mountainous region about 60 miles west of Málaga.
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